‘Big Ideas’ from DCU

On Wednesday 25 September 2013, over 21 Irish inventors and researchers pitched their technology ‘inventions’ to over 350 potential investors at the Enterprise Ireland ‘Big Ideas’ showcase 2013 in the Aviva Stadium, Dublin 4.

At the event, Sean Sherlock, TD,  Minister for Research and Innovation, also presented a special Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Award to Tony O’Dowd, CEO of Xcelerator which is based in the DCU Invent Centre. Xcelerator is a successful DCU spin-out/start-up company, offering cloud based on-line translation using licensed technology from CNGL at DCU

Presenting Mr O’Dowd with his award, Minister Sherlock said, ‘Tony is receiving this award in recognition of the exemplary way in which he has succeeded in bringing his publicly funded research idea from The CNGL Centre for Global Intelligent Content at Dublin City University into business reality, through the start up company Xcelerator Machine Translations Ltd’.

Gearóid Mooney, Manager of Research and Innovation at Enterprise Ireland, congratulated Mr O’Dowd on his achievement and explained why Enterprise Ireland selected him for the award; ‘Tony was an Enterprise Ireland Business Partner and a member of the CNGL industry board when he spotted a commercial application for research conduced by the SFI funded centre. He worked with Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation fund and staff to develop his technology and his business plan to the point where it was mature enough to base a new start up company on it’.

‘Facilitated by the DCU Technology Transfer office, Tony established Xcelerator Machine Translations and licensed technology from CNGL. The company based at Invent DCU, successfully completed a substantial investment in December 2012. The company currently has 14 full time employees and is growing a substantial client base with an innovative cloud based machine translation services’, said Mr Mooney.

The company’s premier product is now marketed as ‘KantanMT’, which transforms how Localisation Service Providers work with Machine Translation technology.  O’Dowd explained how the technology works; ‘With KantanMT, you simply launch your browser, logon, customize your Machine Translation engine and start translating. In many cases, you can be up and running within a few hours. KantanMT is a statistical Machine Translation technology. Statistical Machine Translation utilizes statistical translation models generated from the analysis of monolingual and bilingual content. This approach uses computing power to build sophisticated data models to translate one source language into another’.

Speaking at the ‘Big Ideas’ event,  Dr Richard Stokes, Director of Innovation at DCU, said, ‘Of the 21 presentations being made today, DCU had five which was more than any other college in the country. We are clearly punching above our weight given our share of the national research budget. The presenters pitched their emerging spin-out ideas which are at an advanced stage and which are currently funded under Enterprise Ireland's Commercialisation Fund, often after earlier stage funding over several years by SFI and EU grants’.

The five DCU ‘Big Ideas’ and their presenters were:

•  Rempad: a cloud based platform providing Reminiscence Therapy for nursing homes.  Presenter Julia O'Rourke, a Clarity/Insight project.
•  Innovamab: a disruptive patented drug discovery technology:  Presenter, Dr Paul Leonard, Biomedical Diagnostics Institute
•  Iconic Translation Machines: a cloud based machine translation service for professional patent translators.  Presenter, Dr John Tinsley,CNGL
•  Style Eyes: A revolutionary retail search technology for the fashion industry.  Presenter, Dr Mark Hughes, Clarity/Insight
•  Ata-Bot: An advanced sentiment based search technology for targeted online advertising: Presenter, Dr Deirdre Hogan, National Centre for Language Technologies

‘These ideas, and many others, are a pipeline of potential spin-out companies from DCU. The energy, commitment and vision of all those involved speaks volumes for the level of Innovation and Enterprise at so many levels throughout DCU. All of these Big Ideas have the potential, with the right investment, to make a real impact in the years ahead’, Dr Stokes said.